George Shelley couldn’t say his sister’s name for "five months" after her death.
The former Union J singer was left devastated in April 2017 when his younger sibling Harriet was run over by a car in Bristol at the age of just 21 and he has admitted losing her so suddenly plunged him into severe depression.
Speaking in a new documentary ‘Learning to Grieve’, the 25-year-old star said: "I don’t think I said my sister’s name for about five months afterwards, in a way I didn’t feel confident saying it. I was just by myself at home one day and started calling out ‘Harriet!’ because I missed shouting for her up the stairs, I missed that so much. There’s these little things that you’re never going to do again, but if you just keep doing them and remembering them…"
George locked himself in his room and refused to speak to his friends and family.
He explained: "One of the best analogies I heard about grief was that it’s like glitter, in a sense that no matter how much you tried and tidy it up and clean you are never going to get rid of it all, you’re always going to find bits of it everywhere. It was like someone just turned all the lights off in my head. 2017 was the loss of a lot of things, I lost my relationship and my job, everything kind of came crashing down. I got myself in a really dark place, I locked myself in my room and I cut all of my friends out, my family out, I turned my back on writing because I was finding it really hard to get through songs without getting upset."
George later sought psychiatric help but knows he will never get over losing her.
He said: "It has just completely changed my life. I was really looking forward to moving in, we literally had our whole future planned and this was such a shock. And this is why it’s so important to talk about it and get help because my mental health just plummeted and there was no one to tell me that all the crazy s**t I was doing was a reaction to grief."
George Shelley couldn’t say sister’s name after her death
